Tom Perrotta: By the Book

The author of “Little Children,” “Election” and “The Leftovers” had to force himself to finish “Lolita”: “All that sparkling wordplay just got exhausting after a while.”

What’s been the best book you’ve read all year?

This hardly counts as breaking news, but I reread “The Scarlet Letter” over the summer and was completely blown away. It was required reading that I’d hated in high school and had successfully avoided ever since. What I realized this time around is that it was probably the introduction that broke my spirit.The windy preamble called “The Custom-House” was apparently well loved in Hawthorne’s time, but it’s way too long, almost 40 pages in the edition I read, and pretty much impenetrable to the modern reader. Once you get past it — my advice is to skip it completely — the novel itself is shockingly strange and beautiful, with a narrative momentum and emotional intensity that caught me completely by surprise. But I guess there’s something suitably puritanical about the whole package — pain first, pleasure later. I will go as far as to say that “The Scarlet Letter” is a better novel than “Moby-Dick,” even if it isn’t nearly as sprawling and ambitious. Its only real competition is “The Great Gatsby,” another short, nearly perfect book that illuminates something essential about the American character.

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

I don’t do much reading during the day. I like to read in the evening, preferably while sitting on my screened porch, with a soundtrack of bugs and frogs and passing cars. Reading on planes and trains can be a lifesaver as well. I remember once getting stuck on the runway somewhere, a three-hour delay before takeoff, and losing myself inside James Kelman’s “How Late It Was, How Late,” a peculiar novel about a small-time criminal slowly adjusting to blindness, written in a thick Scottish dialect. The book is amazing, but it’s nearly indecipherable in places and moves at a glacial pace — pages and pages where the main character gropes his way around his apartment, trying to figure out where everything is — and I don’t think I’d ever have had the patience to stick with it if I hadn’t been trapped in a traveler’s limbo, with only that one book to keep me company.

Who are your favorite novelists?

I’ve gone through numerous phases over the course of my reading life — existentialism in high school, magical realism in college, short fiction in grad school, the 19th-century novel in my 30s, a year or so where I only wanted to read P. G. Wodehouse — but there are a handful of writers I keep returning to, the ones who form my personal canon: Cervantes, Tolstoy, Balzac, Henry James, Flannery O’Connor, Dashiell Hammett, Willa Cather, John Cheever, James Baldwin, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro and Tobias Wolff, among others.

What’s your favorite genre? Any guilty pleasures?

I’m addicted to crime and espionage novels, which I mostly consume as audiobooks. There’s something so primal about the combination of a gripping story and a voice in your ear — it reminds me of the way I read as a kid, hungrily, oblivious to my surroundings. But there’s nothing remotely guilty about the pleasure. The writers I like in these genres — Richard Stark, Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman, Elmore Leonard, Michael Connelly, John le Carré, Graham Greene, Kate Atkinson — are all remarkable artists in their own right.

This may mark me as a certain kind of philistine, but I prefer storytellers to virtuoso stylists. I’ve never really connected with Nabokov, for example. The first few chapters of “Lolita” are breathtakingly good, but the narrative bogs down pretty quickly. I had to force myself to finish the book, and by the end I could barely remember the excitement I’d felt at the beginning — all that sparkling wordplay just got exhausting after a while. I’m also pretty wary of self-consciously “experimental” writing, though I realize that experimentation and boundary — pushing are essential parts of any living tradition. It’s hard to imagine how groundbreaking a book like “Don Quixote” must have felt at the time of it publication, though it seems so familiar and inevitable now.

Do you have a favorite suburban novel?

Suburban novels are really just small-town novels in contemporary clothing, and my favorite small-town book is “Winesburg, Ohio,” by Sherwood Anderson, a heartbreaking collection of stories about thwarted dreamers and lost souls in the kind of idyllic community you might expect to see in a Norman Rockwell painting. Anyone who thinks suburban malaise or small-town despair is a recent invention should go back to the 1920s, when Anderson and Sinclair Lewis were mapping what they considered to be the spiritual wasteland of Middle America. Willa Cather provided a more nostalgic and loving vision of the same territory, but she herself fled from rural Nebraska to Greenwich Village the first chance she got. For my money, the great contemporary suburban epic is John Updike’s monumental sequence of novels about Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, four books that illuminate the social and sexual history of post-World War II America through the microcosm of one deeply flawed man in a Pennsylvania town, a former high school athlete with an insatiable appetite for sex, food and money.

What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?

I don’t think of myself as a big reader of graphic novels, but when I survey my shelves, I’m surprised to see how many I own and to realize how important many of them are to me. I’m a big fan of Alison Bechdel (“Fun Home” is a masterpiece), Marjane Satrapi, Art Spiegelman and Harvey Pekar, in particular — I think they’ve created something new and wonderful over the past few decades, a hybrid mode of storytelling that seems capable of illuminating every aspect of human experience. I have to give a particular shout-out to “Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth,” which is an illustrated biography of Bertrand Russell and his failed attempt to create a purely logical system of mathematics. My whole family read the book, and we made many hilarious efforts to explain Russell’s paradox to one another — the one that asks the unanswerable question, Did the barber shave himself? We all thought we understood it perfectly until we opened our mouths and started talking.

Do you ever read self-help? Anything you recommend?

When I’m struggling with my own work, I’m often drawn to biographies of writers. Not only do I learn fun facts about prominent figures — Henry James suffered terribly from constipation, Kafka chewed every bite of food 32 times, Flannery O’Connor cared for a flock of around 40 peacocks, Montaigne never saw his wife with her clothes off, Balzac fortified himself with a paste made of unroasted coffee beans — I’m also reminded that there’s no single path for living a successful creative or personal life. It’s inspiring to read about a flawed human being who struggled with his or her demons and afflictions, experienced paralyzing episodes of failure or self-doubt, but somehow managed to do the work anyway, and produce something that enriched the world. That’s my version of self-help.

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Tom PerrottaCreditIllustration by Jillian Tamaki

What have you learned from Hollywood that you’ve applied to fiction writing?

Writing screenplays made me realize how much freedom and autonomy the fiction writer has. You can do the work by yourself, without anyone’s permission, anywhere you happen to be, with supplies that cost a few dollars. And that same freedom extends to the work itself — it can be any length you want it to be, and it can pinball all over the world, range freely through time and illuminate the interior worlds of your characters. I love the collaboration involved with film and TV, and marvel at the power of the moving image, but switching back and forth between the two realms has made me appreciate my freedom as a fiction writer in a way I hadn’t before.

If you could adapt any book for film, what would it be?

I don’t go around looking for books to adapt, but Megan Marshall’s wonderful biography of Margaret Fuller got me thinking that somebody should make a “Downton Abbey”-style mini-series about romantic intrigue among the New England transcendentalists. The central characters would be Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who shared this intense, passionate, but gruelingly chaste friendship. Fuller yearned for more, but the married Emerson wasn’t looking for a sexual affair — he just wanted Fuller’s scintillating conversation. So Fuller became a long-term houseguest (to the dismay of Emerson’s long-suffering wife), a brilliant young woman tormented by her unrequited love for the famous older man. Then you have people like Thoreau and Hawthorne and the Alcotts lurking in the background, a free love commune nearby, and all the political tumult of the decades leading up to the Civil War. I’d watch that show.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

I’m sure the president has read Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” but it might be worthwhile for him to revisit it. Maybe it would cheer him up to remember that the irrational hostility and demonization that’s been directed at him isn’t something unprecedented in American history, though it sometimes feels that way. Nativists and proud ignoramuses and angry racists have been around for a long time, and they’re drinking from a deep and toxic well. But it might also stiffen his spine — there’s no reasoning or bargaining with people who think a modest expansion of health insurance is the beginning of the apocalypse.

What books do you remember most from childhood? Any stories or characters that really stuck with you through the years?

At some point in my childhood I read a book called “Strange but True Football Stories” that I’ve never forgotten. One of the chapters was about Jim Marshall, a defensive end for the Minnesota Vikings who picked up a fumble, got disoriented, and ran into the wrong end zone. He thought he was scoring a touchdown for his team, but he was actually scoring a safety for his opponents. I got fixated on what I thought was a particularly shaming detail — that he was swarmed by players from the other team, happily congratulating him on his error. It seems like a funny story to me now, the kind of self-deprecating anecdote you’d laugh about years later, but as a child I thought Marshall must have been embarrassed every minute of every day for making such an unforgivable mistake. I really wasn’t sure how he managed to live with himself.

What book has had the greatest impact on you? And the greatest impact on your writing?

I read “The World According to Garp” when I was 16, and it changed my life. I was an avid reader at the time and a would-be guitar player, but “Garp” allowed me to articulate a new ambition: I wanted to be a writer, and by writer I meant both Garp and John Irving. I’ve been lucky enough to meet John Irving a couple of times — last spring I interviewed him onstage at the John F. Kennedy library in Boston — and I think I conducted myself with reasonable composure in his presence, but the teenager inside of me couldn’t quite believe what was happening — that the man was real, and that he was actually talking to me.

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t?

It’s probably a form of heresy, but I’m going to have to say “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which I read for the first time this past year. I enjoyed the narration, which is charming and tart, and was interested in the courtroom drama. But I have to say that, decent as he is, Atticus Finch is a mystifying character. Throughout the novel, Atticus foolishly downplays the danger posed by Bob Ewell, the violent, racist drunk who forces his daughter to falsely accuse Tom Robinson of rape. Angered by Atticus’s defense of the innocent black man, Ewell confronts Atticus, spits in his face and vows to get revenge. Atticus blithely insists, “We don’t have anything to fear from Bob Ewell.” When Ewell makes good on his threat and tries to murder the Finch children, Atticus seems genuinely shocked, lamely insisting that Ewell must have been out of his mind. By the end of the book, Atticus feels less like a hero than a deluded liberal in a Flannery O’Connor story, a man so blinded by his own virtue that he can’t recognize the evil that’s standing right in front of him.

If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?

I used to say Hemingway, but then I saw “Midnight in Paris.”

If you could meet any character from literature, who would it be?

Holden Caulfield. I’d like to find out what he does for a living.

What are you planning to read next?

I’ve been meaning to read Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” for a long time. I’m saving it for my next plane trip.